24 September 2010

ESPRIT Workshops: Could you contribute to world class success?

As revealed in last week’s UK Sport newsletter, the ESPRIT consortium will be hosting their inaugural workshop-style conference on 8 October at Loughborough University, in order to attract experts from across the UK to contribute to the Elite Sport Performance Research in Training with Pervasive Sensing (ESPRIT) project.

The ESPRIT project is funded by the EPSRC and led by Imperial College London in partnership with UK Sport, supported by Queen Mary University of London and Loughborough University. It involves researchers from the three universities working alongside British sport via UK Sport’s Research and Innovation programme.

For the first time in the history of UK Sport’s Research and Innovation programme, this conference will pioneer a novel approach to finding solutions to performance questions by bringing together representatives from both Britain’s multi-medal winning sports, such as sailing, cycling and rowing, and the technicians who could deliver the solutions, to encourage collaboration from the moment of conception of the ideas.

The four interactive workshops – The Paralympic Challenge, The Sports Medicine Challenge, The Talent Trainability Challenge and The Workload and Technologies "Man and Machine" Challenge – have been named as such because the workshop leaders will be proposing performance ‘challenges’ to delegates, in the hope that meaningful solutions will begin to take shape from the discussions that take place on the day.

For delegates, this could also lead to a once in a lifetime secondment opportunity to the ESPRIT project, working directly with Britain’s high performance sporting community via UK Sport’s Research and Innovation Programme to give our Olympians and Paralympians a performance edge at the London Games in 2012 and beyond.

Multiple secondment opportunities could be made available to the right individuals, with the support of their current employer, to work on projects across the spectrum of Britain’s elite sports and across the UK. The timescale of the secondments will also be flexible and dependent on the requirements of individual projects.

In order to decide which of the four workshops you may want to attend, you can listen here to the workshop leaders who will tell you more about what will be explored in the individual workshops and the type of people who may want to attend.